Friday, June 8, 2012

Apichatpong's Tropical Pulse

I discovered Apichatpong Weerasethakul in my global art
cinema class taught by Dr. Mark Betz. We were shown his film , ‘Syndromes and a
century’ and were left quite disoriented at the end of the film. After then, having seen Tropical Malady and
Mysterious object at noon , it is only but evident that this filmmaker has his
emotional quotient very deeply rooted with his people in Thailand. Apichatpong’s
narratives seem to have the lightness of a grasshopper, effortlessly moving from
one figment to another, yet , binding all these figments in a close network of
emotional ties, which weave the film
into a overwhelming mood piece.

While watching his recent short , Ashes, shot using the Lomokino
, which premiered at Cannes this year, the most eloquent aspect of the film
that struck me was his keen ear to the sounds of memory. The visual aesthetic
of the flashy overexposed film lends itself the hazy misty air of
transformative contingent recollections. The dog on leash, the ambitious pig in the sty, the sounds of birds in the distance, of
rustling palm leaves on a breezy coastal afternoon, of steaming rice in the
kitchen , and a stroll in the evening, all these little details are intuitively
captured. The film gradually shifts into craftwork when the filmmaker overlays
the same ‘home’ footage with digitized aberrational sounds that echo a certain
kind of appropriated pulse of technology. Ashes , performs a simple act of
placing a finger on your wrist to place your pulse.

A similar pulse ran through his first film, Mysterious
Object at Noon, which uses both enacted and documentary style of filmmaking ,
to present a collage of deeply personal narratives that evolve around myths and
folklores of Thailand, and emerge out of a vernacular sensibility . There is a
sense of nostalgia in every fragment , a revocation of intimacy and
helplessness. The mise en scene has touches of tactile everyday domesticity. The
film which explores a narrative based on the game of spontaneous story building
, which the surrealists indulged in, therefore , opens up the margins of the
film. The film makes room to allow moments of collapse of the control of the
camera. The pace of the film is as if the whole two hours of viewing were
drowned into a time warp bubble, the heart beats of the audience seem to race
beyond the pulse of the filmic experience.

The story of a mysterious object which turns into a mysterious boy who is said to have killed his
teacher , gains life, like a local myth, through its renewal and retelling
through various people . It turns into a seed to develop different modes of
performing the story , while at the same time allowing for spontaneous filmic
siestas . The element of magic , of course, is the tiger , which enters the
plot towards the end, into the hitherto
human story , which pushes the realm of the narrative into becoming a fairy
tale, the storytellers being curious and inventive school kids. The tiger finds
again an important part to play in his ‘Tropical Malady ‘, again resorting to a
dispersed thread of narration of folklore. In ‘Syndromes and a century’, the
vast slow camera pan around the different urban and pastoral locations , and
elongated time lapses generously given for the spaces themselves to emote and
take forward the film’s mood, reflect a keen sensitivity towards spatial
emotive topographies , that perhaps could have come from Apichatpong’s primary
training as an architect prior to his education in fine arts and films.

His
regular video art pieces and shorts, which have been produced religiously over
the years , alongside his long features , seem to help keep agile his film
craft and inventive fervor. Apichatpong’s cinema seems to resonate with a
certain wisdom . A wisdom which is nurtured by the international
fraternity and as apparent by the widespread press coverage, is celebrated as a
unique coming together of a global and a regional sensibility in the filmmaker.

1 comment:

naveen kumar j
said...

Hi srajana,

Really enjoyed reading your article.. i did experience some sort of filmic siesta while watching mysterious objects at noon iffk 2010..there is some magic he creates in films.. i remember not knowing how react after watching blissfully yours.. because i had never experienced the worlds everydayness in its own pace in a movie.. the sound in his films(particularly tropical malady and uncle boonmee) adds a mysterious quality to his films.